Turn the World Upside Down

[Newer posts are at http://spritzler.blogspot.com/ and www.NewDemocracyWorld.org ]
On top, world elites are the thousands, imposing inequality and fomenting wars to control us. Under them, we are billions in resistance. Let us turn the world upside down.

Saturday, March 11, 2006

The Israeli, United States and European governments are all threatening to cut off aid to the Hamas-led Palestinian Authority "unless it seeks peace by peaceful means."

Before getting to the heart of the matter, let's be clear--just for the record--that the media reports on this with deliberately deceptive language: they refer to the Hamas-led "Palestinian government" as if the Palestinians had some kind of sovereign government in Gaza/West Bank, when in fact they do not: the Israeli government controls Gazans from the outside, and it has an outright military occupation of the West Bank. Israel holds the real sovereign authority in both areas nominally controlled by the Palestine Authority.

Now for the heart of the matter. For the governments of Israel, the U.S. and Europe to demand that Hamas "seek peace by peaceful means" is morally exactly the same as if, in 1944, the Hitler German government and the "French" Nazi-puppet Vichy government and their Japanese ally had demanded that the French Resistance "seek peace by peaceful means." Absolutely the same. The Nazis created an Aryan state in Germany and expanded it outwards to include France. Those deemed to be non-Aryans (whatever the hell "Aryans" are) were treated as sub-humans by the Aryan state. The Nazis demanded that the non-Aryans accept Nazi rule peacefully.

Anybody who thinks that the French Resistance was justified in taking up arms against the Nazis, or that Americans and Brits and Russians had the right idea when they enlisted in armies to take up arms against the Nazis, cannot in all good conscience think differently about the identical rightness of Palestinians taking up arms against Zionists who have imposed a racist Jewish state on 78% of Palestine and who control Palestinians in the remainder of Palestine with a brutal military occupation.

But, some say, Hamas does bad things. They kill innocent Israeli civilians. OK, fair point. But to stay fair, then, the Israeli and U.S. and European governments should say to Hamas, "You have every right to take up arms against the Zionists, just don't kill innocent civilians." This, of course, is where the U.S. and British governments find themselves in a bit of a bind. For in World War II these governments, using the pretext of fighting fascists, targeted, attacked and killed hundreds of thousands of ordinary civilians who were, themselves, anti-fascist. The Allies killed anti-fascists not by mistake, not as collateral damage, but deliberately, in order to ensure that elite power in Europe and Asia would not be replaced with genuinely democratic working class power. (This is discussed in my book The People As Enemy: The Leaders' Hidden Agenda in World War II) To carry out this mass murder of innocents, the Allied governments purported to be the champions of armed struggle against fascists.

So what we have today is the disgusting spectacle of Western governments--with a sordid history of mass murdering innocent civilians and justifying this mass murder on the grounds that it was part of the morally right use of violence against fascists-- warning the Palestinians that they should not emulate the anti-Nazi Resistance fighters because....because what? Because Hamas kills innocent civilians?

In two previous posts here I have expressed strong disapproval of Hamas for its failure to provide the kind of leadership, based on international working class solidarity (which rejects killing innocent civilians), that it will take to defeat the racist Zionist project. But obviously this problem of the Palestinians in no way negates their right to take up arms against their oppressors. Let us be clear that when governments preach to Hamas about the need for the Palestinians to "seek peace by peaceful means" they are playing the role of modern-day Nazi thugs, pure and simple.